Christopher R. Browning facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Christopher R. Browning
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Browning in 2019
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Christopher Robert Browning
May 22, 1944 Durham, North Carolina, U.S.
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| Education |
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| Occupation | Historian |
| Era | The Holocaust |
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| Thesis | "Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland and the Jewish Policy of the German Foreign Office 1940–1943" (1975) |
Christopher Robert Browning (born May 22, 1944) is an American historian. He is a retired professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Browning is an expert on the Holocaust, a terrible time in history when millions of Jewish people were killed.
He is famous for his work explaining the "Final Solution" (the Nazi plan to kill all Jewish people). He also studied how people carried out these Nazi plans and used stories from survivors. Browning has written nine books, including Ordinary Men (1992) and The Origins of the Final Solution (2004).
Browning taught at Pacific Lutheran University from 1974 to 1999. He then became a professor at UNC in 1999. After retiring from UNC in 2014, he was a visiting professor at the University of Washington.
He has also been an expert witness in trials related to the Holocaust. These include the trial of Ernst Zündel in 1988 and the important case of Irving v Penguin Books Ltd in 2000.
Contents
Early Life and School
Christopher Browning was born in Durham, North Carolina. He grew up in Chicago. His father was a philosophy professor, and his mother was a nurse.
Browning earned his first degree in history from Oberlin College in 1967. He then got his master's degree in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW) in 1968. He taught for a few years before earning his PhD from UW in 1975. His PhD work became his first book, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office (1978).
Browning married Jennifer Jane Horn in 1970. They have two children, Kathryn Elizabeth and Anne DeSilvey.
His Important Work
Ordinary Men Book
Browning is most famous for his 1992 book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. This book studied a German police group called Reserve Police Battalion 101.
This group was involved in mass killings and gathering Jewish people for transport to Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland in 1942. Browning's book suggested that the men in this unit killed people because they were told to by authority figures and felt pressure from their friends. This idea was partly inspired by the famous Milgram experiments.
The book explained that the men of Unit 101 were not strong Nazis. They were regular middle-aged men from Hamburg who had been drafted. They were ordered to terrorize Jewish people in ghettos and carry out mass killings of Polish Jews. This included men, women, and children.
The commander of the unit once gave his men a choice to opt out if they found it too difficult. However, fewer than 12 out of 500 men chose not to participate. Browning showed that not all the men were filled with hate. Some even begged to be given other work. He shared stories of men who refused to kill children and were given different tasks. One man even demanded to be released, got his wish, and was promoted when he returned to Germany.
Ordinary Men received much praise. However, some, like Daniel Goldhagen, criticized it. Goldhagen argued that Browning missed a key point: a specific German culture that led to the Nazi killings. Goldhagen's 1996 book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, was written to challenge Browning's ideas.
Irving v. Lipstadt Trial
In 1996, a writer named David Irving sued historian Deborah Lipstadt for libel. Irving claimed that Lipstadt had damaged his reputation by calling him a Holocaust denier. Browning was a key witness for Lipstadt's defense.
Browning wrote a report about the evidence for the mass killing of Jewish people. During his testimony, Irving suggested that the full story of the Holocaust was not yet known, implying there might be doubts about it. Browning responded by saying, "We are still discovering things about the Roman Empire. There is no last chapter in history." This meant that even though historians keep learning, the main facts are clear.
Irving also argued that there was no written order from Adolf Hitler to carry out the genocide. Browning explained that such an order might not have been written down. He said Hitler likely told his top leaders what he wanted, making a written order unnecessary. Browning noted that many experts agree there was no written order for the "Final Solution" but no historian doubts the reality of the Nazi genocide.
Browning also disagreed with Irving's claim that there was no reliable information on the number of Jewish people killed. Browning stated that historians debate whether five or six million Jews were killed mainly because some archives in the former Soviet Union were hard to access.
Browning's View of the Holocaust
Browning is known as a "moderate functionalist" when it comes to understanding how the Holocaust began. This means he focuses on how the Nazi government and its different parts worked, rather than just on Hitler's direct orders.
Browning believes the killing of Jewish people was not planned from the very beginning. Instead, it developed over time as the Nazi government became more extreme. This happened especially when they faced the "problem" of three million Jewish people (mostly Polish) whom they had forced into ghettos between 1939 and 1941.
At first, the Nazis wanted to expel these Jewish people to other areas. But as Second World War events unfolded and different Nazi groups argued among themselves, expulsion became impossible. By 1941, some officials were ready to consider mass murder.
Browning explained that the phrase "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" first meant a "territorial solution" (moving people to a specific area) until 1941. But then, it changed to mean mass murder.
Awards
- 1994: National Jewish Book Award for Ordinary Men
- 2004: National Jewish Book Award for The Origins of the Final Solution
- 2010: National Jewish Book Award for Remembering Survival. Inside a Nazi Slave-labor Camp
- 2011: Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research for Remembering Survival.
Selected Books
- (1978). The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office.
- (1985). Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution.
- (1992). Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.
- (1992). The Path to Genocide: Essays on launching the Final Solution.
- (2000). Nazi policy, Jewish workers, German killers.
- (2003). Collected memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony.
- (2004). The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942 (with Jürgen Matthäus).
- (2007). Every Day Lasts a Year: A Jewish Family's Correspondence from Poland.
- (2010). Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp.
- (2015), with Michael Marrus, Susannah Heschel and Milton Shain, eds. Holocaust Scholarship: Personal Trajectories and Professional Interpretations.
